How Democrats Fall Short in Challenging Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Fervor

The fight against the President’s nativism should be one based on morals, not economics.

Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty

The autocrat’s world is terrifying. He lives surrounded by enemies,
shadowed by danger, forever perched on the precipice. The autocrat’s
best trick is getting everyone to believe that we are all in peril. A
year ago, Donald Trump devoted his Inaugural Address to enumerating the
largely imaginary horrors of American life; on Tuesday, in his first
State of the Union address, he boasted of keeping danger at bay and
emphasized the need for ever greater protection, particularly against
the “open borders [that] have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our
most vulnerable communities.” Immediately after, Representative Joseph
Kennedy III delivered the official Democratic response with an eerily
familiar sense of frightened urgency. “This Administration isn’t just
targeting the laws that protect us,” Kennedy said, “they are targeting
the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.” The unofficial
Democratic responses from Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, and others
sounded less terrified, but did not overtly attack Trump’s central
message about the danger of immigrants. The Spanish-language response
delivered by the Virginia legislator Elizabeth Guzmán struck the
more traditional notes of immigrants’ American dreams, but stopped short
of a direct challenge to the Trumpian framing of immigration as a threat
to the country.

The predicament is not exactly new: Democrats—like much of the Western
left—have long found themselves in a position of merely mitigating the
damage done by the endlessly ascendant anti-immigrant right. Proposing a
cardinally different view of immigration, one that rejects both fear and
pity, has become politically unimaginable. Trump did not create this
dynamic, but he has brought it into new relief.

Trump has held immigrants responsible for all the fears in which he
traffics, from terrorism to rape to economic uncertainty. A year ago, he
unveiled a special hotline for reporting crimes allegedly committed by
immigrants. During his State of the Union address, he framed his
immigration-policy proposals in terms of crime: gang violence and drug
trafficking.

In his rebuttal, Sanders met Trump halfway. “We need to seriously
address the issue of immigration,” he said, as though it were generally
accepted that the United States is currently dealing with unusually
large numbers of immigrants or facing unusually burdensome questions of
immigration. (It is not.) He brushed aside Trump’s proposed solutions to
the imagined problem and went on to promise to protect Dreamers. Kennedy
made the same promise.

So did Trump. The President’s four-part proposal, released a few days
before the State of the Union address and summarized in the speech itself,
promises a path to citizenship for Dreamers, along with a border wall,
an end to the visa-lottery program, and severe cuts to family-based
immigration. Trump repeated his promise to move to a merit-based
immigration system. This is the other logical framework he applies to
the issue of immigration: the right to enter this country must be
earned.

The Democrats grant Trump this premise, too. Kennedy and Sanders both
said, in effect, that Dreamers have earned the right to stay in the
United States by growing up here; focussing on Dreamers is a way of
avoiding a larger conversation about immigration. Kennedy engaged Trump
in a rhetorical tug-of-war about the Dreamers: where Trump said that
“Americans are dreamers, too”—implying that the aspirations of
native-born Americans are more important than those of
immigrants—Kennedy switched to Spanish to offer assurance to the
Dreamers: “Ustedes son parte de nuestra historia.” You are part of our story. The phrasing seemed
unintentionally to reaffirm the you/us divide, but the bigger issue is
that the official Democratic response did not address immigration beyond
the issue of Dreamers—because, it appears, congressional Democrats have
little to say on the topic.

The standard Democratic objection to anti-immigrant policies is that
immigrants are good people who benefit the economy. This was the basic
message of Guzmán’s speech. There are variations and amendments to this
argument: not all immigrants are terrorists; immigrants commit fewer
crimes than non-immigrants; they serve in our military. All of this is,
essentially, the same meritocratic logic that Trump is proposing; they
are merely haggling over the price.

A different approach to thinking about immigration would frame the issue
in purely moral terms rather than largely economic ones. It may address
American responsibility in a world in which tens of millions of people
have been displaced by war, famine, and violence. This would mean
talking not only about the Haitian or Salvadoran refugees who are being
deported from the United States but also about the hundreds of
thousands of Syrian and Yemeni refugees who have no hope of entering the
one country in the world best situated to give them shelter. It may
address the future of a planet that is slowly becoming unsuitable for
human habitation, and the American responsibility to those who lose
their homes as a result. It may even question the premise that the dumb
luck of having been born in the United States gives a group of people
the right to decide who may enter the premises.

Trump, of course, is obsessed with birthright, whether it concerns his
children’s wealth or Barack Obama’s Presidency. By instinct, he is
particularly sensitive to potential challenges to Americans’ birthright
to be the gatekeepers of this land. He has repeatedly singled out the
visa-lottery program, which accounts for a very small percentage of
people who immigrate to the United States, but is the one program that
exposes the random nature of borders and of the distribution of
passports. Of course, randomness is, among other things,
terrifying—especially if you have convinced yourself and others that the
world is full of danger, and that the purpose of politics is protection.